Background: On July 28th, 15 people from North East Illinois met in a Round Lake, IL home to establish a new PDA Chapter. The area has recently been redistricted into Illinois' 10th Congressional district. Jeanne Maria Dauray, chapter chair, explains the motivation behind the group.

"Some of us were so progressive that the term “Democrat” no longer applied. Some of us had considered ourselves Democrats all along, but realized much greater action needed to be taken as we watched in horror

horror what was happening to our neighbors just over the border in Wisconsin. And others of us had considered ourselves independent voters, but realized we were merely feeding the political beast."

"So, when I saw PDA come up in a Facebook newsfeed, I quickly joined the effort, realizing it was going to take a special kind of Democrat to make this country move forward again.

" A few weeks later, I received an email from PDA asking if someone would like to host a coffee for a progressive Democrat, Ilya Sheyman, running for US Congress in my district. I immediately answered the call, and realized this would be a great opportunity to find other progressive Democrats in my community. It was then that I began emailing, calling, and messaging everyone I knew that might be interested, while PDA also put out the call. Within a few short weeks we had a gathering of well over 20 people at my home meeting Ilya and talking about taking real action.

Now, a month later, we have created a local chapter and attended Town Hall meetings where we confront our current Congressman, Joe Walsh. Other members have helped out at the Democrats’ booth at the Lake County Fair, many helped organized a protest that made its way onto the Chicago nightly news, and we continue to attract members both in elected office and who are running for office.

We have planned actions to help with canvassing and phone banks in Wisconsin this August, as well as to do canvassing locally for Ilya Sheyman. We’re off to an exciting start, and it really was as easy as calling up all the people we knew and getting them excited about making a difference.

Illinois Articles

The standard Republican meme, that everything is better done by the private sector, has been debunked in almost every way imaginable (more on that in a bit), but there’s perhaps no more graphic an example of the private sector being much, much worse than the unionized public sector than the Chicago Public Schools janitorial staff.
One Southwest Side elementary principal — who along with others did not want her name printed for fear of retribution — said in a telephone interview that since Aramark took over the school, it has developed...

“Family run businesses are a great investment. They are part-and-parcel of a community. Corporate raiders like Bruce Rauner will never understand that,” said Dr. Dupuis, co-owner of Wheatland Animal Hospital. Dupuis employs more than two dozen residents of DuPage and Will counties.
The billionaire GOP candidate who pledged to run Illinois ‘like a business,’ will put the interests of his Wall Street pals ahead of Illinois’ main street small businesses
Chicago, IL – Last week, billionaire gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner advised a group of business students at Northern Illinois University to avoid...

Over one hundred Chicago public school students, parents, and community members marched to the city's Board of Education on Monday to demand an end to the school closures, mass lay-offs, and undemocratic political deal-making they say are devastating one of the largest public education districts in the country.
Organized by the Chicago Students Union, which spans 25 of the city's schools and boasts over 200 student participants since it launched last year, the crowd held a mid-day press conference then marched to the headquarters of the Chicago Board of Education. At...

Escalating a fight with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a company that stores enormous mounds of petroleum coke on Chicago's Southeast Side is threatening to sue unless city officials allow the gritty piles to remain uncovered for another four years.
KCBX Terminals, a firm controlled by industrialists Charles and David Koch, is pushing to delay the construction of storage sheds for two years past a 2016 deadline imposed by the Emanuel administration in response to complaints about black dust blowing into surrounding neighborhoods.
The company also wants to raise the maximum height of its...

Charter school operators aren’t the only one’s not being held accountable—a major complaint of the Chicago Teachers Union—it’s the machine politicians angling for electoral support and continued political power.
The War on Independents Wages On
Battle lines were once again drawn between Chicago’s machine democrats and independent democrats when Ald. Toni Foulkes was remapped out of her Southside 15th Ward that changed from a majority of African Americans to 68.3 percent Hispanic.
There may be numerous candidates campaigning for the open 15th Ward aldermanic seat but there is certain to be one...

Senate Democrats plan to make an end-of-session push this week to “rectify an historical wrong” -- and perhaps give women a strong reason to go to the polls this fall -- by putting Illinois on record in support of an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The bid to revive the Equal Rights Amendment, which was the subject of an epic Statehouse battle in the early 1980s that helped kill the feminist push to amend the U.S. Constitution, comes from state Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago and could be a vehicle for...

More than 40 years after the Equal Rights Amendment was first passed by the U.S. Congress, an Illinois state senator is taking another crack at getting her colleagues in Springfield to adopt the provision that would enshrine in the U.S. Constitution the idea that rights can't be abridged on account of sex.
Sen. Heather Steans, D-Chicago, said the proposed amendment is still relevant today given the ongoing debates about equal pay, abortion rights and other issues on which women are fighting for equality.
And she said it's symbolically important to "get Illinois...

It’s official: Illinois on Wednesday joined 15 other states and the District of Columbia in legalizing same-sex marriage.
Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, accompanied by state Rep. Greg Harris, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and several other dignitaries, signed into law a measure allowing gay couples to begin marrying on June 1. “It’s a triumph of democracy, a triumph of government by the people,” said the governor, shortly before signing. “We want to have a new birth of freedom across America, and love is not relegated to second-class citizen status.”
The historic nature of...

On Monday, November 18 at noon almost 100 voters rallied in Springfield to ask Senator Richard Durbin to keep cuts to Social Security off the table. Senator Durbin has proposed possible changes such as lifting the Social Security eligibility age and implementing “Chained CPI” for individuals that earn more than $24,000. After an informational picket along Edwards Street the group followed lead organizer JoAnn Conrad retired AFSCME, IEA-NEA, chair of the Progressive Democrats of Greater Springfield, led the rally across Edwards to the senator’s office. The message was “Scrap the...

Those who rely on food stamps will have to make do with a little less beginning today as a boost in funding from the federal stimulus package is set to expire.
The change will affect more than 2 million low-income residents in Illinois who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to the Illinois Department of Human Services. Nationally, about 47 million people are expected to feel the pinch.
The move marks the end of an extra $45.2 billion the federal government funneled into the food stamp program beginning in...

As another coal train derailed in southern Illinois last weekend, the Illinois State Historical Society teamed up with the Illinois Coal Association on Saturday for their own collision with history during the installation of a historical marker for the state's "First Coal Mine." The real train wreck: Among numerous errors, the Illinois State Historical Society marker fails to mention that other coal mines abounded in southern Illinois, thanks to enslaved African American labor -- including the so-called "first coal mine" -- while the Illinois Coal Association took the occasion...

The pinnacle of last week's Take Back Chicago rally at UIC came near the end, when the 11 aldermen onstage were asked point-blank whether they support pending proposals to slow privatization and tax increment financing deals. Yes or no?
As more than 2,000 of the city's most dedicated activists looked on, the aldermen all said yes—even though a couple of them are among the most consistent council supporters of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
They then sat there smirking, as if to say, you can't trap me, because I'm too slick.
Things got so absurd...

Two sections that essentially told kids that coal was safe and good for the environment disappeared today from the website of a state agency in Illinois.
The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has removed coal-related educational sections from its website, less than two weeks after the launch of a grassroots campaign demanding that the pages be taken down.
The website sections were supposed to educate children about energy, but had been widely denounced because they focused on misleading pro-coal messages.
It wasn't just environmentalists who objected to the way Illinois was...

As absentee oil and gas companies register with the state of Illinois this month, downstate citizens groups are taking the lead among statewide environmental groups and laying out scientific and legal standards for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and Joint Committee on Administrative Rules to consider prior to drafting the controversial horizontal hydraulic fracking rules.
In a letter sent this week to the key legislative committee and state IDNR agency officials, the groups representing rural communities targeted for fracking operations cite "several new scientific studies and academic research papers that...

Dear Rep. Schock,
I am a constituent, writing in my role as coordinator of the Greater Peoria Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA).
I and other PDA members were at your town hall meeting in Heyworth, where some of your constituents encouraged you to vote to shut down the government unless the Affordable Care Act is defunded. In reply, you made the sensible point that ACA can't be defunded through the budget process, and that shutting down the government would bring extremely negative political consequences for Republicans. You also stated that...

Inside the 40th annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Chicago, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and other right-wing big-wigs addressed ALEC members and on-the-dole politicians.
Outside, the…